Thermal ink jet printheads are fabricated with multiple columns of heater resistors. The printheads are formed using fabrication techniques similar to those used for integrated circuits, e.g., deposition of layers on a wafer, following by masking, photo cross-linking, and etching. The conventional design for the mask used to create openings for the heater resistors uses a single rectangle about each resistor. One advantage of this design is that the resistor lengths do not need to be identical in cases where there was a reason to have different resistor lengths. However, the topography is more complex for this arrangement, creating reflections that make higher layers uneven.